Our love and affection for the earth helps make us creative
problem solvers,
... but something is making us dodge big ones too.

We've let the conversation become conspicuously quiet on some of our greatest
problems. This is about one, how using efficiency to reduce environmental
impacts generally accelerates economic growth and resource use, accelerating our
impacts instead. It seems the root error is that what makes
efficiency profitable is letting you use less of one resource to have more
access to others. That does "create resources" *for the user*... BUT
only in the sense of creating new access to resources, and so accelerates their
depletion elsewhere on the earth. The "trick" our minds play on us
is confusing our subjective view (efficiency creates resources) with a global
view (efficiency accelerates depletion), because of our cultural neglect of
"systems thinking". (1/7/11)

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. urged us to not be bystanders in our own lives,
saying:

Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter."

Because we didn't understand that *local and global views are opposite for
many things* and we don't "follow the money" to check... our way of acting
in our self-interests has been a major source of the conflicts between people and nature instead of relieving them.
We've been trusting the wrong solutions, blinding ourselves to the great moral and practical
problems that have to be faced to bring an end our need for growth.

The problem with
our concept of
I = P • A • Tis that it's reallyI = P • A • T•
S

a linear equation missing the hidden 'S' for productivity STIMULUS, the main
purpose people use efficiencies for

making P • A = f (T, E) reflecting

how People useTechnology
to consume Environment for
making Affluence
and morePeople

Efficiency is being
used for sustaining growth, not the earth,
Trusting it to reduce our impacts also keeps us from facing the great moral and practical
problem, of
...how to end the need for growth.

9/2/10The
curves at the left demonstrate
the oddly ignored 150 year old observation of Stanley Jevons, that
improving efficiency results in accelerating resource use.
He first noticed it in how improving efficiency for steam engines used
up coal faster. The problem is we mostly use efficiencies to
simplify our tasks and so make resource use more profitable, to become
more affluent. The "secret" of how it works is that the
particular efficiencies we choose to invest in are the very ones that
for a small cost have the effect of simplifying a whole system of parts,
often with improved technology. That causes an increased
productivity of the whole greater than the decreased needs of the more
efficient part. That's called growth, the redesign of
production systems so they can use and consume more.

To achieve the opposite effect
and be responsive to our strains on the environment we'd need to bring
growth to an end, rather than accelerate it with more efficiency...
We've let ourselves be misled, in part, and stumbled into a natural
misunderstanding much like early doctors who applied leaches to remove a
patient's "bad blood". By believing that sort of myth for
too long we're now slipping into grave danger of creating
development we'll be unable to either maintain or replace, instead of
"winning the war with nature", causing a physical system bankruptcy of a
lasting kind.

The love and affection people feelfor the earth, and all their
devotion to the task of doing things right, is being disserved by what
seems to be deeply uncritical thinking. One can also see it as a
natural handicap to overcome, how our minds misuse knowledge so very
easily. We only understand things by constructing our own story
about them, and treat that as reality. We can't help
it, and construct our stories using the myths of our own culture.
Myths sometimes grow and spread like rumors with no foundation at all,
and sometimes stop meaning the same things when the world itself
changes. A great many of our cultural myths no longer mean
what they once did, since we began to collide with successive limits of
the earth ~100 years ago. Expanding opportunity
carries with it increasing conflict, is one of them, and our culture is
founded on the idea of ever expanding opportunity.

It takes
being highly objective to distinguish between realities of nature and
the stories we make up for ourselves, though. Seeing the
above curves shows you something nature is evidently making sense of
somehow, her way, that conflicts with our ideas. What
we don't understand is a rather good pointer to physical reality, since
we evidently didn't make it up, and nearly all our own understandings
are actually stories we made up to fit our own cultural myths.
If it's important, how nature makes sense of things that we can't, is
what we need to stretch our minds to fit around.

It's how our economy naturally works
that makes using efficiency for reducing resource impacts have the
opposite effect. It's been
called Jevons' "paradox" because we don't see how the whole system
becomes more productive by reducing the costs of strategic individual
parts. It's been fairly widely discussed though.
People have just acted as if inhibited in thinking about it, and not taken it to heart, not
even to refine their thinking about how to save the planet from our
accelerating overconsumption.... Even scientists mostly ignore how
the real effect on the economy completely contradicts most
recommendations for what to do. So the whole issue,
staring us in the face, is being quite ignored by educators, activists,
the media and government and seems not to be a focus of any large scale
effort in organizing, planning or research. We seem to not have started
raising the deep moral and practical problem, that our economy responds
to increasing efficiency by digging our society into an ever deeper hole
to climb out of. Partly it's our belief in productivity as a
way to solve problems, when our problem now has become being too
productive in using the earth.

It's also a remarkable story about
our cultures of knowledge, and how people frequently develop
disconnected stories for what they think are disconnected issues, unaware of
connections in the physical world.It
happens
partly because it's easy to think by snap judgments, and to create
cultural realities by popular social agreement.
For how to achieve sustainability it seems much of the social networks
act as if the earth will respond to our love and affection alone,
treating social group cohesion as trumping critical thinking and closely
observing environmental responses. Somehow even modern economists
don't seem to mention that efficiency has always been understood as a
primary growth stimulus, and that it would fail entirely as a strategy for reducing
"externalities" like the use of primary resources for growth.
In part that's because economists treat quantitative physical
measures (rigidly constrained by the conservation of energy), as
limitlessly adjustable qualitative measures of value, so their
recommendations are adjustable too. Numerous other
professional and popular views interpret the quantitative physical world
with their own separate cultural value system too, almost as if treating
the physical world as not even existing. Someone needs to
research the full story of these resulting confusions. It's both important intellectual
history and critical for getting to the bottom of why we
let our main solution for relieving our impacts on the earth be a direct
multiplier of the very problem we intended to solve.

Sustainability
does need efficiency, just not for sustaining our system of ever growing
resource use. It sadly does mean that the central tenet of
sustainability has the opposite of the intended effect on our
environment. The recent history of how the mistake in thinking spread seems to start in the language
used for
sustainability plans, limiting the cost of resource conservation to what is
affordable while meeting growth targets. The CAFE mileage
standards are a good one there, and the energy codes. People
interested should check and see how it is phrased, carefully reading the introductions to
plans for conserving resources, ending climate change or making the transition to renewable
resources or limiting population, etc. They're virtually all
predicated on sustaining growth and expanding the limits of development. Look for the phrasing
promising that improved efficiency will continue to promote growing
prosperity. Then look at the curves, above.
Then look at your world. Then go back and look at the text,
and at the curves again. Then ask if we should continue
accelerating the problem.

The modern source of the confusion
appears to have been
the Brundtland Commission definition of sustainability.
It seems to have been set up for the technical interpretations that
followed, using a twisted meaning for the word "decoupling" to
describe how to make more money and save the earth at the
same time. It dramatically altered the definition of
sustainability, changing it from being a statement of absolutes to a
qualitative measure meaning the opposite. It became a
promise of "best effort" relative to maintaining acceptable rates of
real growth. It appears the OECD in its role of defining
world economic policy was just "doing its job".
Technically, sustainability is now defined as money growing faster than
the apparent costs of impacts. If you don't see how
that completely devoids the original intent and meaning of
sustainability, go
back and read the last sentence carefully, and think. It assures that all kinds of impacts
needed for growth will keep increasing ever faster, even if intended to
be at
marginally slower rates of increase than the money someone is making
from them. The
only way to stop adding to our impacts is to stop adding to them,
of course, in quantitative not qualitative terms. Slowing a rate
of acceleration is NOT deceleration. Really!

What has to change is how investors see
the purpose of their role in choosing how to change the parts of our
economic system. It is investors who choose what to physically
turn our world into, by what additions and replacement parts for the
system they choose to invest in. They need to accept their
natural fiduciary responsibility to preserve the system they are hoping
to profit from. That's the environmental commons with no
owner we all share. Their obligation is to make choices that
steer the economy toward reducing its physical burden on the earth, and
away from our otherwise approaching threshold of exhaustion.
We're a long way down the road to the latter as the now dramatic
explosion of diverse global and interdependent environmental, financial
and social crises clearly demonstrates. Investors need to
actually use their profits from investments to actively prevent the
continued undermining of our whole investment in the earth.
We're a long way from understanding what physically sustainable
investment is, though. It starts with the rudiments of
how to use
money as a quantitative physical measure of impacts, then
needs us to understanding how to copy sustainability techniques from
natural system economies and address the
related difficult financial issues.

We need to see our moment in history
as one of our society changing form, as organisms are often seen doing
to reach their next phase of development at the end of the preceding
one. How so many other complex societies before ours have
failed to progress that way is ample demonstration of the hazard.
If we don't address the real challenges before us, but just keep making
growth more efficient till our options for change are exhausted, our
complex society will more or less abruptly vanish at some not distant
point in time, as relatively small failures of parts cascade to become
the ultimate end of the whole, as happened for the others.

"Our lives begin to end the day
we become silent about things that matter." Martin Luther King Jr.

Those able to see these errors
need to be employed in helping guide the change. We need to fix this, and
other fatal errors still part of our thinking. ( please
help)